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He was cutting them down like they were weeds, jumping from shape to shape as he went.
“Stop it,” Leon growled. “I almost shot you twice!”
“Any sign of them?” Alessandro asked.
“No,” Bern reported.
The real fight hadn’t even started. These were the preliminaries. Neither Arkan nor any of his two remaining Primes and six Significants were on the field.
Arkan would have to provoke Alessandro. It was just a question of who he would use.
Konstantin and Leon were mopping up the intruders. If Arkan was going to push the go button, it would be now.
A woman strode into the opening at the bottom of the hill and jerked her hands up.
“It’s Krause,” I called out to Alessandro, covering my mike. “He’s using her as bait.”
“I wonder what she did to get on his shit list.”
“Do you want to go for it?”
“She’s not going to give us much choice.”
I took my hand off my mike. “Please go to your designated circles.”
A cascade of explosions came from the south.
I grabbed the tablet off the counter and pulled up the feed from the motor pool. The southern end of the property looked like hell on earth. Here and there asphalt burned with crimson magic. An oak crashed to the ground and caught on fire. The motor pool’s roof in front of the camera looked like Swiss cheese.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Across the wall, something exploded sending a geyser of dirt and fire into the air. A person howled in pain. Grandma Frida must have scored a direct hit.
Another mortar answered, splashing crimson fire against the motor pool. The front wall curved outward, bulged, and fell.
Magic cracked above my head.
“Bern?”
“She opened the portal directly above you.”
On the tablet’s screen, a tankette rolled out from behind the motor pool to face the southern wall. It was barely larger than the average full-size SUV. A 40-barrel stacked projectile volley gun rose from the tankette’s roof. Unlike normal guns, stacked projectile batteries had no moving parts. Each of the barrels was stacked with bullets that had no casing and no primer. The bullets were fired electronically when a pulse was sent through the barrel. The rate of fire was insane.
The tankette brayed like a donkey, burping its entire arsenal in a fraction of a second.
This was the closest I had ever come to an actual war zone.
“Linus?” Grandmother Victoria said.
“I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’m a little busy at the moment.”
Cornelius ran into the Wedding Cake and came to stand next to me. Konstantin was close behind. I pulled the chalk out of my pocket.
At the foot of the hill, Krause was straining. I could see her arms shaking from where I stood. She had already opened two portals today and whatever she was pulling out of the third one was draining every last bit of her magic.
“I have the kids, Zeus and Sgt. Teddy,” Runa reported. “I’m activating.”
Magic flared in the distance, somewhere in the main house, a bright smudge across my mind that shone and vanished.
Leon jogged into the pavilion like he didn’t have a care in the world. He hopped over the chalk boundary and landed by Cornelius. I crouched and finished the circle in two quick lines.
“We have lightning,” Bern reported. Whatever she was summoning was about to come through.
“Today,” Grandmother Victoria ground out.
“On my way,” Linus said.
Something drummed on the Wedding Cake’s roof like hail. Creatures fell into the Compound in a monstrous waterfall.
“If he isn’t here in thirty seconds, go ahead and do it,” Victoria said.
An acrid stench spread through the air. The roof to the right of me broke, and a creature fell into the pavilion. The size of a medium dog, it had no head or neck. Its body resembled a leathery sack, fish-belly pale, splattered with whorls of neon orange and turned on the side, so the opening served as its mouth. Four pairs of spindly long legs supported the sack, while two smaller limbs thrust from its belly, armed with three clawed fingers.
Leon shot it. It jerked and died.
“Arrived,” Linus announced.
An explosion of blinding white burst in my mind’s eye. Grandmother Victoria, unleashing her power like a sun going supernova. She blazed and vanished.
I sank a punch of power into the circle. The chalk lines flared white and then all sound vanished. Another creature fell into the Wedding Cake through the hole and bounced off the invisible boundary of the circle. The four of us were cut off from reality by null space.
On the patio Alessandro’s circle ignited with orange. A tornado of amber sparks spun around him. He jumped and hung suspended, the current of magic whipping around him. It suffused him, setting his skin aglow. He shone like a star.
This was the second time I’d seen it, and it took my breath away again.
Alessandro’s eyes blazed with power. He looked like a god about to unleash his righteous wrath.
